Oct 28 · 5 min read
From a Reddit thread to a merged pull request
How one feature went from research to production, with me carrying it the whole way.
I trained as a product designer, and I'm a founding PM by title. On a team of five, nobody hands me a research report, and nobody takes my spec away to build. I carry a feature the whole way. Here's what that looked like for one: letting supervisors log time for their crew.
Research, with no users yet. In my first couple of weeks I built a listener that follows 18 competitors across 15 subreddits and ranks how people feel about 50 features. Alongside it: 6–8 customer interviews, plus the people our sales lead was already talking to.
Synthesis, in a matrix. I scored industries against how much they needed each feature: must-have, nice-to-have, don't need. It gave us a first market. Once we chose it, one need stood out: on a job site, the supervisor often logs hours for the whole crew, not only for themselves.
Deciding where it lives. Not every team has someone logging for others, so it became an optional module, turned on in settings. Teams that don't need it never see it.
The spec. I wrote the PRD with Claude, going back and forth until the edge cases I hadn't thought of were answered. It names who the feature is for, the research signal behind it, and what it must, should, could, and won't do. Some teams are skipping written specs entirely and prototyping instead (Julie Zhuo and Henry Modisett). When agents do the building, I've found the opposite: the spec matters more, because it's the first thing they read.
A comment period. Our sales lead checked it against what customers were saying. Our engineer checked how it would hold up at two million users. The founder checked it against the product vision. I revised, then turned the PRD into a phased build plan.
The build. Front end, back end, database migration, and SOC 2 compliance checks, each run by AI agents with the right expertise, some in parallel. I review every phase and test the prototype as it forms. The design work doesn't end at the spec: UI changes often land near the end, once I can click through it.
Review and tests. A fresh agent reads the code without the builders' bias and usually finds redundancies and simpler paths. Tests cover every plan and role. I run them, then a teammate runs them again and approves the merge. Then the whole team tries it in dev, each through their own lens, before it reaches production.
What I get from carrying it end to end: the research signal that started the feature is the same one I check the prototype against at the finish.